Lately, I have had a hard time getting into anything super fluffy or without high stakes, which has been tricky during my annual reading/listening of winter/winter holiday setting books.

So I was scrolling through my Goodreads for inspiration & realized that Hither Page by Cat Sebastian has a cover that appears wintry. And lo’ and behold, it’s set around Christmas. And there’s suspense & mystery & murder! And it’s set in England right after the end of WWII, so that almost guarantees that it can’t be TOO fluffy. I started it right up & was glad to find within a short while that not only is there all of that, there’s a protagonist whose reaction to arriving in an English village at Christmastime is that he wants to get out of there as soon as possible, otherwise, “he was going to have to be jolly, heaven help him.”

But in case it might seem a bit TOO dark, what with the additional facet of both characters having been naturally impacted by the war, (which was rather inescapable), the dark is balanced with a good deal of light. There’s a lot of humor, and not all of it is gallows’ humor, (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And it IS a romance, with moments of hurt/comfort and warm fuzzies, even if that takes a backseat at times to the whodunit. There are also odd side characters in a small-town setting for added interest.

I will admit that I had a bit of a hard time remembering names/details for side characters. This small town setting is kind of like one of those house party murder mysteries in which everyone is a suspect one way or another or perhaps a catalyst to someone else deciding to commit the dastardly deed. But I’m terrible with names and character histories in general & if I weren’t a binge listener/incurable speed reader, I’d learn to take notes for just about everything I read. So it’s entirely possible that other people won’t have so much trouble.

I really enjoyed the audio narration done by Joel Leslie. He’s hit or miss for me, and even when I enjoy his narration, there’s usually some little aspect that’s off, (like his tendency to make anyone over the age of 50 sound positively ancient). But in the case of this book, I really don’t have a single caveat to how much I enjoyed it. I absolutely plan on sticking to audio when I hit up the next book.